


A Question of Trust

by Kainosite



Category: Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Genre: Coalition, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:12:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve has a new life, a new country.  And he isn't sure there's anything in his old one that's worth coming back for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Question of Trust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [subito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/subito/gifts).



In California, every day is perfect. The nights are always cool, the afternoons are always warm. The sun is always shining, so much so that the news blares warnings of hundred year droughts, hosepipe bans and brush fires in the hills. But Steve has never taken much interest in gardening, and no trace of smoke wafts across the verdant lawns of Palo Alto.

His students at Stanford are bright and eager, and even the poorest among them just want to get on in life, without the chippy resentment and the stifling atmosphere of class consciousness that poisons everything back in England. Crowdpac grows in leaps and bounds, and it’s such a liberation to be able to come up with a new idea and just go ahead and implement it, without first having to engage in months of trench warfare with civil servants for every inch of ground. Some of the ideas fail, but that’s the whole point: you try things and some of them work and some of them don’t and that’s how you make the project better, that’s how everything evolves.

He sees Rachel every day and gets to tuck the boys in every night. He can stroll into work in shorts and a t-shirt and no one even gives him a second glance. In the local co-op where they buy their groceries there are bins of granola lining the back wall, dozens of them, more kinds of granola than Steve could have imagined existing in the world. Notting Hill wasn’t exactly an urban food desert, but this is a whole new paradigm. It’s not entirely clear to Steve that the world _needs_ fifty different varieties of granola- he tries them all and he can’t tell the difference between most of them- but he loves walking into the shop with his Tupperware and seeing that magnificent array spread out before him in all its whole-grain glory.

And gradually he comes to realize that he isn’t going back. That his family won’t try to live straddling two continents for another decade, that they are not expats but immigrants, that this vast and bountiful country which has absorbed so many lives will take in four more. His future lies with Crowdpac, not with David Cameron. In due course he and Rachel will take American citizenship, and one day the politics of California will matter more to him than the fate of the Conservative Party. The boys, who have already all but lost their English accents, who say “soccer ball” and “gotten” and ask for “cookies” and “french fries”, will grow up to be like the young people he teaches at Stanford, kids whose faces come in every conceivable shape and color but which all have a cheery American sameness to them, a blithe confidence that they live in a country which, in the words of its president, has its best days still ahead of it.

The thought fills him with a certain wistfulness but no regret. He will always care for Britain. It was his birthplace, his home for forty years, and he will always be grateful to the country that gave his parents refuge. But as the months go by it begins to feel more and more distant, a small island half a world away, prominent in world affairs only because of a legacy of empire that becomes more irrelevant with every passing year. The American news scarcely covers it. Increasingly his time in Westminster feels to him like his time at university, a chapter of his life which, though vitally important and all-encompassing at the time, is now complete.

The future doesn’t lie in those dreary, rain-drenched streets, that society weighed down by an archaic class system and fifty years of socialism, where every spark of innovation is promptly smothered by the lumbering bureaucracy of Europe and the clanking machinery of central government. The future is here: Rachel, Ben and Sonny, Crowdpac and Stanford. Steve closes his eyes and lets the knowledge soak into his bones like the California sunshine.

“The Golden Country,” that’s what they used to call America back in Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, and that’s what it is to him: an endless golden summer stretching out to the horizon.

* * *

In the beginning, while he still thinks of Britain as “back home”, Steve tries to keep up with the news. He skims the _Times_ and the _Telegraph_ over breakfast and keeps an eye out for interesting columns in the _Spectator_ , even hacks his internet browser so he can watch _Newsnight_ and _Question Time_. But as time goes on his interest wanes and following the little peaks and troughs of the Government’s fortunes begins to feel like a chore. There are so many other things to occupy his attention: adapting to life in a foreign country, putting together a syllabus for the course he’ll be teaching in the autumn, looking after the boys, spending time with Rachel.

The US is caught up in the excitement and turmoil of a presidential election, but nothing much is happening back in the UK, at least, nothing positive. The Government has tinkered with the tax code just enough to piss off the voters without doing anything to cut through the tangle of regulation and bureaucracy that makes doing business in Britain so unappealing. Without the supply side reforms that are so desperately needed the economy stalls out and the Conservatives’ poll ratings stall with it: not high enough to win the next election, not low enough to prove they’ve accomplished anything in office. It’s the worst of both worlds, and it’s frustrating and fucking depressing to watch, even from a distance. It’s very small consolation to know that he couldn’t have made things better even if he’d stayed, because he’d tried to convince David to take action for two years and it was like trying to batter down a brick wall with his head.

A week goes by in which he can’t be arsed to read the papers, and then two, and pretty soon he’s forgotten his _Times_ password because he hasn’t logged in for six months. The browser hack is mostly used to watch the Olympics on iPlayer, to spare the Hiltons from the awful American coverage. He still gets some news through less official channels: Rohan emails him once or twice a week with interesting bits of Westminster tittle-tattle, and he gets a handful of letters from Michael, longhand with international postage because Michael likes to pretend he’s living in the Victorian era. Steve writes back dutifully, but it all seems increasingly irrelevant, office gossip from someone else’s office. After a year Rohan quits too and Michael gets distracted by obscure feuds with the Home Office and the Liberal Democrats and forgets to write, and soon, without Steve quite knowing how it happened, all the lines of communication are dead.

He finds out about David’s “Get rid of all the green crap” comment from an article in _The Economist_ , which Rachel opened to the right page and accidentally-on-purpose left sitting on the breakfast bar. He’s been trying to make his mind up for weeks about whether to tell David he isn’t coming back and shut that door forever, and Rachel has never had much patience with indecision. Steve never makes it to the end of the article. He just reads that one line over and over again, trying to decide how he feels about it.

He ought to feel betrayed- and maybe he does, there’s a deep, dull ache somewhere in his chest cavity, like he’s pulled a muscle in his heart- but he can’t seem to muster any anger. He’s not even surprised, not really. It’s of a piece with everything else: David’s steady retreat in the face of any serious pressure from the civil servants or the Liberal Democrats or the Conservative backbenchers or even, as in this case, Ed Miliband’s shambolic Opposition. In a way it’s almost reassuring, a confirmation that Steve’s decision to leave the Government was the right one, that there’s nothing in England worth going back for. He gives David his answer the next day. It doesn’t feel like a door slamming shut, more like a shackle falling open.

He’s so convinced that he’s finished with the Government, and the Government with him, that it comes as a complete shock when Michael Skypes him out of the blue and asks him to come back to help with David’s conference speech.

Maybe it shouldn’t, because he’s worked on the speech every year. In 2012 he was dragged back against his will, because it was in his contract and he had to do it or he wouldn’t get paid for the time he’d already put in. After the misery Heywood and his sneering little cronies had put Steve through all spring, he wasn’t going to let them keep his salary on top of everything else. The next year he came back because his year’s sabbatical was up and he was trying to make up his mind about whether to call it quits for good. He wound up getting in a flaming row with Lynton Crosby, who had seized control of everything in the year he’d been away and wound the clock back to 2005.

Neither experience had been particularly positive, for Steve or anyone else. He can’t imagine why David might want him back. What would be the point, when he’s gone to such lengths to demolish every policy they’d ever worked on together?

Steve frowns at the screen, but he’s not going to hang up on Michael, which is probably why David asked Michael to make the call in the first place.

“What’s the matter? Is David afraid to call me himself?”

“I’m the Chief Whip now, you know. It’s my job to herd together all our stray cats,” Michael says with a sunny smile, a politician’s non-answer. The evasion catches Steve by surprise- they had always been frank with each other, back in Westminster, and it stings a little to find himself cast out of the circle of trust. But he can’t really blame Michael. His exile was voluntary, and he’s fared better than those he left behind.

He feels a pang of… not regret, exactly, but a sort of survivor’s guilt. He would make the same choice again in a heartbeat, but it seems a cruel cosmic injustice that he should be here basking in the California sunshine while Michael was left behind to wage endless, futile war against the education lobby and the idiotic Conservative backbenchers, trapped by his loyalty to David. Special advisers can walk away, but a minister and a close ally of the Prime Minister can’t, not without destabilizing the Government. Some MPs would do it anyway, and after the way Michael has been treated Steve wouldn’t blame him, but Michael is too loyal and too decent for that. He’ll stick with David until the bitter end.

But for an accident of fate it might have been Steve in Michael’s place: if the Surrey Heath Conservation Association had made a different choice back in 2005, he would be the MP and Michael the special adviser, free to walk away while he remained chained to his desk in Whitehall. The thought is chilling enough that he lets the question of David drop.

“I heard,” he says instead. “I’m sorry.”

He found out about the reshuffle almost by accident, from a retweet of a retweet that popped up in his Twitter timeline. That particular betrayal did make him angry, so angry that he pulled a Gordon Brown and threw his phone across the room. It didn’t break, but it bounced off the screen of his laptop and chipped the plastic. Every time he uses the computer he sees the scar, a constant reminder of the world he’s left behind and why he is glad to be out of it.

Michael gives a little half-shrug, his mouth twisting in a wry smile. It seems this wound is still too raw to be covered over with the usual ear-to-ear grin.

“I’ve made a great many enemies, which is a complication in a year in which we must ask them for their votes. David did what he had to do.”

“What you mean is, he sacked you for being too successful.”

“Fortunately there is little risk of that in my current capacity,” Michael says cheerfully. “Especially if I can’t lure you back. Oh please come, Steve, just to help with the speech. You don’t even have to come to Conference, not if you don’t want to, but we really do need you. There’s no energy or vision without you, it’s just George rattling off a string of numbers and Lynton doing his best Ukip impression. Come on, we had such fun together last year.”

That’s not how Steve remembers it. Steve remembers a lot of “creative friction” and minimal fun. Then again, Michael’s definition of fun includes getting into heckling matches with Ed Balls and reading Cicero in the original Latin, so his judgement may be a little skewed.

“I did come last year, and a month later David was telling everyone to throw out the ‘green crap’. Honestly, what’s the point in me coming back? No one listens to a word I say. Lynton’s the one writing all our policy now; he can write the bloody speech as well.”

“Please, Steve. Do it for me?”

Michael smiles shyly and looks up at Steve from beneath lowered eyelids, an expression that works better over Skype than it ever did in person, since Michael is so much taller. It’s all an act, of course- the submission is 95% fake and the other 5% is being put on for Michael’s own amusement- but he’s cute and he’s very practiced at playing it up and none of them have ever been much good at refusing him when he makes that face. After the way he has been treated this past year Steve is reluctant to refuse him anything at all, something David no doubt knew when he asked Michael to make the request.

Very much against his better judgement, Steve sighs and tells him yes.

* * *

He wears his “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data” shirt, because someone is sure to ask him what’s on the back and then he can feel smug and superior about it. It’s meager compensation for the ordeal he’s about to put himself through, but he has to take his victories where he can find them. As he boards the plane he can’t shake a growing feeling that agreeing to this was a colossal mistake, but it’s much too late to back out; all he can do is grit his teeth and try to get through it. He doesn’t get any proper sleep on the flight, tossing and turning and unable to settle, getting stiffer and more tense by the hour.

Michael meets him at the airport with a ministerial car. They’re meeting up at Chequers this time: the Prime Minister is spending the weekend in the country to work on his speech, away from the chaos of Downing Street which apparently is awash with civil servants panicking over the Scottish referendum. After two years in California it feels strange to be chauffeured again, like putting on an old pair of trainers he hasn’t worn for a while, slipping into a shape both accustomed and unfamiliar. And it’s strange Michael came to meet him at all. The Chief Whip has- or ought to have- better things to do with his time.

“You didn’t have to come get me,” Steve tells him. “I could have rented a car. I do still remember the way; it hasn’t been that long.”

“Base ingratitude! Is that what they’ve been teaching you in the colonies?” Michael grins, but after a moment his smile slips away and he looks out the window at the trees flashing by. “To be honest, I jumped at the excuse to get away. Otherwise I’d just be sitting in my office worrying about who the next Ukip defector will be. Sitting around at Heathrow worrying about whether your plane would be on time was a welcome distraction.”

“Will there be another defector, do you think?”

“All the likely suspects assure me it won’t be them. Which of course is exactly what one would say, if one were secretly plotting to defect to Ukip. Carswell was a complete surprise; we had no warning. I expect they’ll spring the next one on us too, probably right in the middle of the party conference. Everyone expects me to just _know_ somehow.” He’s getting more and more agitated, the words coming faster and faster, and on ‘know’ he waggles his fingers in the air around his temples in the universal sign for psychic communication. “But I can’t know, all I know is what they tell me. And if they lie to me there’s nothing I can do.”

He slumps back against the seat. “The whips are supposed to have… I don’t know, spy networks, secret vaults of blackmail material. Well, if they have no one will tell me about them. Our whole counter-espionage operation consists of me taking backbenchers out to lunch and trying to tell whether or not they’re lying to my face. I’m so crap at this, Steve. You have no idea.”

“You’re not usually one to doubt your abilities.”

“I don’t usually get locked in a toilet on my first day in a new job.”

Steve can’t help laughing. He tries to muffle it with his fist. “Sorry.”

“No, no, go on. Everyone else has had a good chuckle over it, I’d hate to leave you out.”

He turns back to Steve, his eyes wide and earnest.

“I really am glad you came, Steve. It’s been awful these last two months, but I’m sure things will be better now that you’re here.”

No doubt Michael means to be reassuring, but the knot of dread that’s been growing in the pit of Steve’s stomach since he boarded the plane draws a little tighter.

* * *

When they pull in at Chequers there are half a dozen other cars already parked haphazardly around the front drive, David’s security team and the rest of his entourage. There’s no need to hide them away in the back car park on such an informal visit. It disrupts the perfect symmetry of the neatly trimmed lawn and the raked gravel, and Steve finds the sight strangely cheering: even here in the stodgy heart of the British state a little anarchy reigns. With his spirits a little brighter, he follows Michael inside.

Today is a brainstorming session, a chance for them to work out the broad themes of the speech and put together a framework for the speechwriters to flesh out later. David and George are already hard at work when they arrive, camped out in the more comfortable of the downstairs sitting rooms. The coffee table and a convenient armchair are buried in drifts of strategy papers.

George shoots them a filthy look when they come in, annoyance mingled with disgust, from which Steve deduces that not everyone on the campaign team was clamoring for his return. But the Prime Minister at least seems glad to see him. David smiles nervously and bounds up from the sofa to greet them like an excited Labrador, wavering between a hug and a handshake and settling for a companionable clap on the shoulder.

“I’m so glad you came! A friend in need, eh?”

“I came because Michael asked me,” Steve says pointedly, and sits down on the opposite sofa, away from David.

David ignores the barb and beams at Michael. “He’s very persuasive.”

“Not persuasive enough to keep his job, apparently,” Steve says, and regrets it the second it’s out of his mouth: he didn’t come here to start a row, and between sour-faced George and the anxiety radiating from David and Michael, there’s enough negative energy in the room without Steve adding to it. He just finds the whole thing so frustrating. Michael deserved better.

“Lynton has made it very clear: we can’t afford distractions,” George says.

There’s a nasty edge in the Chancellor’s voice that doesn’t sound like it’s entirely directed at him, and that gives Steve pause. No doubt George still blames him for muddying the focus of the 2010 campaign and costing them a majority- it’s a long-running dispute between them, and since it’s based on counterfactual claims that neither of them can prove or disprove it’s unlikely to ever be resolved- but it’s not like him to quarrel with Michael.

“Where is Lynton, anyway?”

“We thought it would be better if we actually got around to writing the speech, instead of spending the whole weekend listening to you two screaming obscenities at each other. He’ll look it over once we have a draft,” George says coolly, and goes back to the memo he’s reading without giving Steve a second glance.

Oh, fantastic. So anything Steve puts in is going to be stripped out anyway for deviating from their core values of xenophobia and NIMBYism. Why is he even here? But he thinks of Michael’s desperate, hopeful face in the car and figures he owes it to him to try.

“So, what do we have so far?” he asks David, who seems more likely to be civil.

“Well, our economic competence is our biggest asset. The problem is that it doesn’t seem real to people, they can’t see how it’s affecting their daily lives. So the goal of the speech has to be to make that link. We need to show how by tackling the deficit we’re keeping interest rates low and lowering people’s mortgage payments, how lowering business rates is creating jobs, that sort of thing. You can’t lower the cost of living in a weak economy. Once we can make people understand that Labour will be toast. George has worked out some brilliant tax cuts for us, that will be a big part of it, but we have to make the link across the board.”

“Tax cuts?”

“Show him your marvelous tax cuts, George,” David says, sounding like a proud parent.

George extracts a slim folder from the piles of papers on the table and hands it across to Steve without looking up from his notes. Steve flips though the figures. Raising the personal allowance to £12,500, raising the 40p tax threshold to £50,000… It’s all good stuff with mass appeal, but it does raise a serious question.

“Is it funded?”

“We’ll just need to find another £25 billion in cuts. It’s perfectly doable,” David says airily.

“Besides, we have a rolling target for deficit reduction anyway. If we can’t find the savings we’ll just extend the timetable,” George says, finally setting aside the papers in his lap to glower at Steve.

Steve is not a financial expert, but he’s pretty sure that’s code for ‘unfunded’.

“Fiscal consolidation is out the window, then.”

“If Ed Balls becomes chancellor there will be no fiscal consolidation at all,” George snaps.

“If you make concessions on the urgency of reducing the deficit or sacrifice your reputation for fiscal rectitude to hand out a few pounds in tax cuts, it’s going to be a lot harder to stop him.”

“Labour are miles behind us on economic competence and they’ll never catch up, not with Balls and Miliband in charge. We have room to maneuver,” George says. 

“That’s what you said before the 2012 Budget and we’ve been trailing in the polls ever since.”

“Which, obviously, is why we need to do something to shift the dynamic and win back our voters.”

“At this point I’m less worried about George’s reputation than mine. Let’s just hope I don’t have to give this speech as the Prime Minister who lost the union,” David says glumly. “That will require a massive rewrite.”

“Is that likely?” asks Steve. He’s seen the shock poll that put the ‘Yes’ campaign ahead, but he can’t wrap his head around it. The idea of Scotland breaking away just seems so surreal. When the SNP won the Holyrood election in 2011 and it became clear the Government would have to offer a referendum, everyone was confident that as long as they could keep devo-max off the ballot paper they’d be home and dry. There has never been anything close to a majority for independence.

“No,” George says, at the same time Michael chips in, “More likely than it was a month ago.”

George scowls. “They don’t have a currency. Salmond made that clear during the debate. It’s not going to happen.”

“I just can’t understand why they would want to leave!” David says plaintively. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to leave. I love this country, all of it, even the Labour bits. I’m _proud_ to be British. We’ve done so many amazing things in our history. It’s a country people should want to be part of, not one they should be trying to leave.”

“People do want to be part of it,” Michael says. “That’s why the net migration figures are up.”

“Scottish people, though. People like you. Well, not like _you_ you; Scottish people up in Scotland. Our own citizens. Just because they don’t like having a Tory government! We had a Labour government for thirteen years, we didn’t like that, but Oxfordshire didn’t try to secede! There’s an election every five years, you don’t leave the country just because you’re frustrated with the government-” He catches Steve’s eye and stops short, looking stricken. There is a small, awkward silence, and then he concludes softly, “People should feel proud to be British. I want this to be a country everyone can be proud of.”

“We should make that the backbone of the speech,” Steve says slowly, turning the concept over in his mind. David had been speaking from the heart just then. The line might sound corny coming from someone else, but he’d be able to deliver it with conviction. “Then you can give it either way, whatever happens in the referendum. If we win, it’s about restoring unity, and if we lose it’s about healing the wound so other regions don’t start breaking away on a whim. It’s really just the Big Society again, isn’t it? Except even bigger. It’s about rebuilding community, just on a national level. Hang on.”

He grabs a sheaf of papers from the coffee table and starts drawing up a mood board.

* * *

By the time they break for dinner they have the basic thrust of the speech down- a country you can be proud of is one in which everyone has the hope of a job, a paycheck, and a home of their own- and they’re ready to move on to specific policy areas. It’s actually not half bad.

Dinner, on the other hand, is a stilted disaster. Steve and David try to make small talk about _The Killing_ and _House of Cards_ and fail to sustain their own interest in the conversation, much less engage the others. George sits there in sulky silence, viciously stabbing at his lamb chop but keeping any thoughts he may have on Danish drama to himself. Michael, who can generally be replied upon to rescue awkward social situations with the sheer force of unrelenting charm, is pensive and quiet and leaves the rest of them to founder.

By the time they finish dinner and reconvene around the coffee table to start going through some policy areas, any good vibes from the success of their first brainstorming session have gone sour. Steve would like to blame George, but it’s all of them really. Everyone is on edge, and there’s a sense of storm waiting to break.

They get through the sections on home ownership and the welfare reforms without incident, most by virtue of Steve biting his tongue about the shoddy way David has treated Nick Boles and how there’s no way in hell they’re going to realize David’s dream of universal home ownership if they sack every minister who is brave enough to take on the Countryside Alliance. But they hit a snag when they come on to education. It’s quite a big snag, the sort of snag that rips the bottom of the boat wide open.

Specifically, David doesn’t want to mention education in his speech.

“What, like… not mention it at all?” Steve asks, assuming he misheard.

“Well, I suppose we’ll have to have a paragraph on it or Labour will say we’re indifferent to the life chances of the poor. But we need to tick it off the list and then quickly move on.”

Steve can’t believe what he’s hearing. It’s obvious now why Michael wanted him here- from the way George is nodding along, it’s two against one. Probably three against one once Crosby shows up, because this stupidity has his fingerprints all over it. And while Michael has never been one to back down from a fight, after David stripped him of the ministry he loved and put him in another job at which he is, by his own admission, fairly rubbish, he’s probably reluctant to challenge them too vigorously.

“We’re just… not going to talk about the signature accomplishment of this government?”

David has the grace to look embarrassed. “Lynton says it’s a distraction.”

“We put it in last year.”

“Last year we hadn’t seen the polling on it,” George says grimly. “It’s a distraction that reminds everyone how much they hate _him_.” He jerks his head at Michael, who looks down at his folded hands and offers nothing in his own defense.

“I don’t remember you caring so much about personal polling when people were booing you at the Paralympics.”

“I’m the Chancellor. I’m _supposed_ to be unpopular. He provokes people for a laugh.”

“That’s not true,” Michael says sullenly.

“It kind of is true,” David says, punching him gently in the arm to take the sting out of it.

“I had to challenge the Blob,” Michael says.

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to call them ‘The Blob’. Or ‘the enemies of promise’, they didn’t like that one very much. It was all right back when we thought turning around the economy would be enough to win the election, but…” David shrugged. “It seems we need their votes after all.”

“So we just don’t talk about education and hope that in six months people will forget we ever implemented reforms?” Steve asks incredulously.

“We concentrate on the areas where we have a lead, like the economy and law and order and immigration, and we cut out the distractions,” George says.

“It’s a distraction from all the things you said you would do and haven’t done. What _does_ Lynton want you to talk about? Net migration figures? The deficit? You’ve implemented the Darling Plan!”

George glares at him. “It doesn’t actually matter how high the deficit is, as long as the bond markets continue to believe we’re serious about paying it off.”

“Yes, it does, because we’re throwing away billions of pounds on interest payments every year! Were you there for any of the speeches you’ve given on the budget? Were you there for any of your _Budgets_?”

“Yes! Yes I was, and I saw how they were received. If we had cut at the levels you wanted we would be a one term government.”

“You are going to be a one term government! At least if you’d done things my way you would have been a one term government that cleared the deficit.”

“Even if it had been a good idea to override the automatic stabilizers- which it wasn’t- we never could have got it through. Do you really think the Lib Dems would have voted for £25 billion in welfare cuts? Maybe if we’d won a _majority_ -!”

“Oh, right, and that was my fault. All your contributions to that campaign have gone brilliantly. Visited Andy in prison lately?”

“At least Andy had some decent policy ideas that weren’t cloud-seeding and fucking windmills. I don’t know whose phone he got them from, but he had them. Seriously, Steve, what have you contributed? What have you _ever_ contributed?”

“Other than detoxifying the party brand so you could become Chancellor, you mean? Although I’m not sure why I bothered! You’ve become so used to wielding power you’ve forgotten what we wanted it _for_. There’s no point in being in government if you don’t have the guts to change anything.”

“The point of being in government is to _keep them out_. And we have done a fantastic job of that, no thanks to you, Professor Branestawm, and if it doesn’t offend your delicate San Francisco sensibilities too much I’d quite like to go on doing it.”

“You’re not worried about securing David’s second term at all, are you? You just want to make sure the crown passes to _you_.”

Steve knows the instant he says it that he’s crossed a line. If he couldn’t tell from the queasy ball of guilt that hits his stomach like a lead cannonball, he could see it from George’s face, which has gone white as a sheet and taken on that odd rectangular shape it only gets when he’s absolutely furious. David and Michael are silent and shell-shocked.

He should apologize, he has to apologize, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Not yet, not while he’s still trembling with fury. Instead he turns on his heel and walks out, slamming the door behind him.

* * *

One nice thing about Chequers is that as long as the Prime Minister isn’t hosting a formal banquet, it has a lot of empty rooms to sulk in. Downing Street is awful for throwing tantrums. Steve can readily believe the story about Peter Mandelson locking himself in the toilet to cry, because it’s literally the only place in the building you can get five seconds alone. Here he is spoiled for choice. He stalks across the hall to the less comfortable sitting room and stands in the dark by the bay window, looking out at the moonlit lawns and thinking bloody, murderous thoughts about George Osborne and what David might have achieved if he wasn’t surrounded by such pedestrian minds.

A little while later the door opens, admitting a sliver of light from the hallway, and someone slips inside. 

“That could have gone better,” Michael says, sounding more cheerful than he has all evening. He’s always loved a good fracas. Or maybe it’s just the novelty of having someone take his side.

“Your school reforms are the one good thing we’ve done, the one thing we’ve actually achieved, and they want to sweep it under the carpet. It’s unbelievable. And the way David just sat there while George and I were ripping each other’s throats out- I don't know why I'm surprised, it’s fucking typical, but I’d rather he take George’s side than just sit there like he’s in a coma. Then at least we’d know he believed something! But he just gives in to whoever shouts the loudest, and if we’re all shouting at once then hey presto, instant paralysis.”

“He’s not as brave as we thought he’d be,” Michael concedes, closing the door behind him and coming over the stand by the window. “But if you’re fixated on that, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.”

“Am I? What’s the right question?”

“It’s not about what sort of Prime Minister David is. It’s about what sort of person you want to be. It’s easy to follow to someone who always makes the right decisions, someone who always does exactly what you would do in his place. It’s easy to be loyal to a friend who always has your back. The test of character comes when you disagree.”

It should sound hokey and ridiculous, but Michael is so solemn and so perfectly sincere that it’s impossible to laugh or to see his loyalty except as he sees it: a badge of personal honor which, however undeserving the recipient, can only ennoble the giver. For a second Steve feels vaguely ashamed of his more modern morality.

“Are you sure you’re crap at being Chief Whip? Because that wasn’t half bad, just now.”

Michael glances at him sidelong, and the moonlight throws his face into sharp relief as he grins.

“I’m learning.”

* * *

Steve returns to the scene of the crime to make amends to George, but it seems that while he was sulking, the others have gone up to bed. It will have to wait until morning. He goes up as well, peering into the spare bedrooms until he finds the one that holds his suitcase.

As he’s searching for his toothbrush, which he distinctly remembers packing but which seems to have shifted into an alternate dimension during flight, there comes a knock on his door. He opens it to find the Prime Minister standing on the other side.

“May I come in?” David asks, looking a little sheepish.

Well, it is his house. And his country. Steve stands aside and waves him in.

David sits down on the bed. He’s blessed with one of those faces that never shows how tired he is, a real asset for a politician and one George will envy if his turn ever comes to wear the crown, but Steve knows him well enough to read his exhaustion in the slumped lines of his shoulders and the way he collapses onto Steve’s bed like a deflating balloon. Steve feels a little guilty. Being Prime Minister is a difficult job even for someone with a spine, and he hasn’t made it any easier for David tonight.

“That wasn’t quite how I planned for this weekend to go,” David confesses.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to have a row with George. At least not… not one on that scale.”

“It isn’t all your fault. He wasn’t exactly holding back either.” David sighs and and gives him half of a wry smile. The other side of his mouth can’t seem to muster the energy. “To be honest, he’s been acting like a prick all day.”

“I’ll concede that point.”

“You’ll have to forgive him, Steve, he’s just… He’s had a difficult year. The recovery is going wrong somehow and George feels responsible. GDP is up, we’ve created thousands of jobs, but tax receipts are down and our vote share is down. No one can understand it. It’s like all the levers have snapped off at the handle.”

“I’ll apologize. Even if he did start it, there’s no excuse for what I said.”

David gives a hollow laugh. “It’s true, though. The whole party is thinking about Life After Me.”

“The whole party? What about you?”

David laughs again. If possible it’s more bitter than before. “I hear California is lovely this time of year.”

“California is lovely at every time of year. That’s sort of its thing, that and earthquakes. Look, David, why am I here? Really, why am I here? Because if it’s just as a sort of safety blanket for you, I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to be making things safer. I think I’m probably making them less safe.”

“You always have. You push the party out of its comfort zone. That’s why I need your advice.”

“Except you’re not taking it, are you? You haven’t taken it since we got into government.”

David looks miserable. “I know how much I’ve disappointed you. Honestly, it’s the thing I regret most in my whole career. It’s worse than not winning a majority. I can stand the coalition, I can put up with the Lib Dems- hell, in a lot of ways that’s been a blessing- but it breaks my heart to see that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“The one you have now. The one that says you’re giving up on conventional politics because you no longer believe it can make a difference. I hate to think I’ve done that to you.

“But George is right too. It’s no good making supply side reforms or eliminating the deficit in one Parliament if in the process we make the party unelectable. If Ed Balls gets in next May he’ll regulate everything six ways from Sunday and borrow a gazillion pounds because that’s what they do, and it will all have been for nothing.”

“That’s why we needed to bring about a total transformation in the way people interact with the state, so it would be something they can’t reverse! Look at Michael’s school reforms. The teaching unions may hate him, but no one is suggesting shutting down the free schools or bringing academies back under local authority control. Even Labour know they can’t turn back the clock. That’s the kind of change that makes a difference! Look at Margaret Thatcher-”

“I’m not Margaret Thatcher, I’m just me. And even she didn’t transform the country in a single term. If I can fix the economy, keep the party from splitting over Europe and see off Labour and Ukip, I’ll have done a damn good job, frankly. I know it’s not what we dreamed about in opposition, but it’s a lot. You don’t always have to start a revolution to make things better. Sometimes you can build things up brick by brick. No one thinks Harold Macmillan was a transformational Prime Minister, but he built 300,000 homes a year. It may not be as exciting as taking on the unions, but it made a real difference to people’s lives.”

“So will global warming.”

“Yeah, it will. And we have a responsibility to fight it. But this stuff you think is populist, reactionary crap: energy bills, immigration, all of that- people _really_ care about it. They care about it a lot more than they care about climate change or transparent government. If I can’t convince people I care about it too, we’ll lose the election. And if Labour wreck the economy again there won’t be any money left to invest in green technology or anything else. I still care about the things we talked about in opposition. But government has taught me that if I want to change them, I need to care about other things first.”

“Really? Because what it’s taught me is that you lay down a nice little row of bricks and the transformational stuff never gets done because it’s too unpopular or too hard. And at the end of the day you’ve got, like, a garden border, but you don’t have a house. And then you have nowhere to live.”

“I’m not asking you to take it on faith. Help me win this election and give me a chance to prove it to you.”

He holds out his hand, and half against his will, Steve reaches out to take it and gives it a squeeze.

“I’ll write your conference speech. Beyond that I’m not making any promises.”

David smiles. “I’ll settle for that for now. What does the back of your shirt say, by the way? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

Steve turns around and lets him read it. The Prime Minister’s brows furrow at the sight of the blank fabric.

“I don’t get it.”

Steve smiles to himself. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

* * *

Steve wakes late- well, late in English time; it’s a little before 2:00 AM back home- and wanders down to breakfast to find that everyone but George has already finished. The scrambled eggs in the buffet have baked into a strange yellow brick while the sausages, perversely, have gone cold. Steve settles for toast and sits down with it across from the Chancellor. He munches on it awkwardly for a time while George reads the _Telegraph_ and nurses his coffee.

He can’t very well criticize David’s spinelessness if he can’t even find the courage to make one little apology, he tells himself, and takes a deep breath.

“I’m really sorry, George. It was unforgivable, what I said.”

George is surprisingly unperturbed. “It’s all right. Heat of the moment and so on,” he says magnanimously, his head still buried in the paper.

“I know it’s not true. I knew when I said it.”

“As long as we all know, there’s no problem. I should probably apologize as well. You’ve gone out of your way to help David with his speech, and I wasn’t very hospitable yesterday. Pax?”

“Sure.”

“Mind you, I still think most of your ideas are mad. And having three different people trying to run a campaign and pulling in opposite directions is a recipe for disaster. But I’m sorry for taking it out on you; it’s not like you invited yourself.” George polishes off the last of his bacon and smiles at him, the first real smile Steve has seen from him since he arrived. “I liked your shirt, by the way.”

While Steve is trying to decide whether to be pleased or annoyed by this, because it’s nice to have his humor appreciated but he'd rather enjoy having a reason to feel superior to George, David comes in with Michael, looking very grim.

“Sorry chaps, I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut this short. ISIL have beheaded a British aide worker. I have to get back to Downing Street.”

“Don’t apologize,” Michael says. “Go be the Prime Minister.”

“Can you imagine Ed Miliband taking that call?” George asks when he’s gone. There is a shared moment of collective horror.

“Can we put that in the speech, or is it tacky?” Michael asks, and raises his hands in surrender when they all turn to him incredulously. “Joke! That was a joke!”

“We can talk about the general case, though. It’s a question of trust, isn’t it,” George says.

“It always is,” Steve says, thinking of his conversation the night before.

* * *

As the hall fills for David’s big speech, the mood among the delegates is electric. Miliband’s spectacular and emblematic cock-up in his own conference speech a week earlier has for the first time in months given them real hope for victory. Forgetting to mention the deficit and immigration- it would literally be impossible to design a gaffe that could more perfectly reinforce public doubts about his priorities and his fitness for office. Meanwhile, Mark Reckless’s underhanded defection to Ukip- on the eve of the conference with the express purpose of sabotaging it, and after giving repeated reassurances to Michael and to fellow backbenchers that he had no intention of jumping ship- has stoked everyone’s tribal instincts. Carswell may have been acting out of principle, but Reckless is and always has been a slime mold and this was treachery pure and simple. The rest of the party has rallied round the flag, and they’re determined to crush him in the forthcoming by-election.

And there is more treachery to follow, for Ukip have announced, with great fanfare, a press conference scheduled immediately after David’s speech. It’s sure to be a second high profile defection- anything else would be anti-climatic at this point- and the party is preemptively working itself into a rage. Ever since Steve sat down, the little old lady with the cut-glass accent and the lavender jacket sitting in the row behind him has been mumbling a continuous stream of invective directed at Nigel Farage and his “People’s Army” that would shame Malcolm Tucker.

The Conservative Party is ready for battle. They just need a general.

And from the moment David walks onto the stage, poised, confident, the image of a Prime Minister, reading his speech from the autocue like a grown-up instead of trying to dredge it up from memory like a child with a parlor trick, it’s clear that they have their man.

They’re an easy crowd: they’re spoiling for a fight, they know they need someone to lead them into it, and David is the obvious candidate. They want to believe in him. They want to be won over. But a bad speech or a bad delivery could remind them of their doubts, ruin the positive mood of the conference that has persisted despite the odds and set off another damaging eddy of leadership speculation.

It’s a good speech. It’s not quite the speech Steve drafted back in September- Crosby’s had his grubby fingers all over it, red meat on immigration and tax breaks for rich pensioners, everything geared to appeal to their aging, xenophobic party and not to the country, and it’s obvious that the intro bit with the WWI veteran was tacked on at the last minute and never properly integrated- but it’s solid, and David delivers it with conviction. And after all it is their aging, xenophobic party he’s addressing today. For all his efforts, Steve never managed to replace it with a better one.

David carries the room, and for a moment it’s easy to imagine that he will carry the country. The audience stagger out into the lobby a little dazed, drunk on applause and possibility, and Steve forgets about the Ukip press conference completely. He’s chatting with some sociologists from the University of Manchester about issue-based campaigning and the fragmentation of the political landscape when Michael dashes up to him and thrusts an iPad into his hands.

“Make it show the news,” he says urgently. He’s always been hopeless with technology. He stands by fidgeting impatiently while Steve navigates them to a BBC live stream, which purports to be showing the Ukip press conference. There are a bunch of reporters standing around on the lawn in front of someone’s stately home, looking cold and bored. There is no sign of Nigel Farage or a Tory defector.

“They’re thirty minutes late. I don’t think they’re coming,” Michael says, grinning. “Whoever it was, they’ve bottled it, they changed their mind.”

“Just from David’s speech?” It doesn’t seem possible, and yet there it is on camera: the empty, windswept lawn.

“His magnificent oration has won their heart. Or struck the fear of Miliband into it, it could be that. We’ve done it, Steve! We’ve turned the tide!”

It seems someone else has decided to give David a second chance. Steve thinks of the rapt audience, how desperately they’d wanted to believe in him. He comes across as earnest, passionate, sincere. People want to trust him.

Steve wants to trust him. And maybe, just maybe, if he can be patient for a little while longer, if they can win this next election and David can find the moral courage that Steve saw in him once, that must still be buried somewhere deep inside, David will finally prove himself a prime minister worthy of that trust.


End file.
